by Boris Akunin
Suga listened, knitting his thick eyebrows together. He touched his curled moustache a couple of times and ran his hand nervously over his short-cropped brush of hair. Erast Petrovich had not yet learned to tell the age of locals, but to look at, the vice-intendant seemed about forty-five. The titular counsellor did not push himself forward, he stood behind the maritime agent and the consul, but the policeman addressed his response to him.
‘Mr Vice-Consul, have you not confused anything here? The launch definitely went to Susaki that night, not to any other mooring?’
‘I could not have confused that even if I wished to. I don’t know Tokyo at all, I’m haven’t even been there yet.’
‘Thank you, you have gathered very important information,’ said Suga, still addressing Fandorin directly, which caused a grimace of dissatisfaction to flit across the lieutenant captain’s face. ‘You know, gentlemen, that the steamship ‘Kasuga-maru’, the first modern ship that we have built without foreign help, is moored at Susaki. Last night His Excellency was there – at a banquet to mark the launching of the steamship. The Satsumans found out about that somehow and probably intended to lie in wait for the minister on his way back. Everyone knows that His Excellency moves about without any guards at any time of the day or night. If the officers of the ship, having taken a drink or two, had not got the idea of unharnessing the horses and pulling the carriage by hand, the assassins would certainly have carried out their criminal plan. You say that they ordered the launch again for the end of this night?’
‘Yes, that is c-correct.’
‘That means they know that today His Excellency will go back from here in the small hours. They could easily land at some mooring in Simbasi or Tsukiji, steal through the dark streets and set up an ambush at the minister’s residence in Kasumigaseki. Gentlemen, you are doing our country a truly invaluable service! Come with me, I will take you to His Excellency.’
Suga whispered in the minister’s ear and led him out of the respectful circle of guests towards the Russian diplomats
‘Tomorrow all the local newspapers will write about this,’ Bukhartsev said with a self-satisfied smile. ‘It could even get into the Times, but not on the front page, of course: “The Strong Man of Japan Conspires with the Russian”.’
The report on the situation was run through for a third time, this time in Japanese. Erast Petrovich caught a few familiar words: ‘Fandorin’, ‘Rosia’, ‘katana’, ‘Susaki’, ‘Kasuga-maru’ – and the endlessly repeated ‘satsumajin’ probably meant ‘Satsumans’. The vice-intendant of police spoke forcefully and bowed frequently, but not subserviently, more as if he were nudging his phrases forward with his shoulders.
An expression of annoyance appeared on the minister’s tired face and he replied sharply. Suga bowed again, even more insistently.
‘What’s happening?’ Bukhartsev asked in a low voice – he obviously did not know Japanese.
‘He refuses to accept a guard, but Suga is insisting,’ Doronin translated quietly, then cleared his throat and said in English: ‘Your Excellency, permit me to remark that you are behaving childishly. After all, in the final analysis, it is not a matter of your life, but of the future of the country that His Majesty the Emperor has entrusted to your management. And in any case, the guard is a temporary measure. I am sure that your police will make every effort to find the conspirators quickly. And for my part, as a consul, I will set up an investigative group in Yokohama – no, no, naturally not in connection with the anticipated attempt on Your Excellency’s life (that would be interference in internal affairs), but in connection with the suspicious circumstances surrounding the demise of a Russian subject.’
‘And I shall assign my most capable men to assist the investigative group, which will give you the support of the Japanese authorities,’ put in Suga, also speaking English. ‘I swear, Your Excellency, that the police guard will not bother you for long. The miscreants will be seized within a few days.’
‘All right,’ Okubo agreed reluctantly. ‘I will tolerate it for three days.’
‘Three days might not be enough,’ Fandorin suddenly declared from behind the backs of the state officials. ‘A week.’
Bukhartsev glanced round in horror at the violator of etiquette. Suga and Doronin also froze, evidently afraid that the minister would explode and tell them to go to hell and take their guard with them.
But Okubo looked intently at Erast Petrovich and said:
‘Are you the man who has been assigned to lead the investigation? Very well, I give you one week. But not a single day longer. I cannot allow some cranks to limit my freedom of movement. And now, gentlemen, please excuse me, I have to talk to the British consul.’
He nodded and moved away.
‘He did that deliberately,’ Bukhartsev said in Russian with a sour face. ‘To restore the balance. There won’t be any article in the Times.’
But his voice was drowned out by Suga.
‘Well done, Mr Fandorin! I would never have dared talk to His Excellency in that tone of voice. A whole week – that is wonderful! It means the minister has fully understood the seriousness of the threat. He would never have accepted bodyguards before. He believes in fate. He often repeats: “If I am still needed by my country, nothing will happen to me. And if I am no longer needed, then it is my destiny”.’
‘How shall we organise the investigation, General?’ Bukhartsev enquired briskly. ‘Which of your deputies will you attach to the consular group?’
The vice-intendant, however, addressed Fandorin, not the maritime agent.
‘Your superior told me that you have worked in the police. That is very good. I will not give you a bureaucrat from the administration, but one of my inspectors – naturally, one who speaks English and knows Yokohama well. But I must warn you: the Japanese police are not much like the other police forces of the world. Our people are efficient, but they lack initiative – after all, not so long ago, they were all samurai, and a samurai was taught from the cradle not to think, but to obey. Many cling too tightly to the old traditions and simply cannot get used to firearms. They shoot incredibly badly. But never mind, my material may be in a rough state, but it is gold, pure 24 carat gold.’ Suga spoke quickly and energetically, emphasising his words by waving his fist. ‘Yes, my samurai have a long way to go to match the British constables and the French agents as far as police training is concerned, but they do not take bribes, they are diligent and willing to learn. Give us time, and we will create the finest police force in the world!’
Fandorin liked these passionate words, and the vice-intendant himself, very much. If only, he thought, our police force was run by enthusiasts like this, instead of stuffy gentlemen from the Department of Police. He was particularly struck by the fact that the police did not take bribes. Was that possible, or did the Japanese general have his head in the clouds?
Discussion of the details of future collaboration was interrupted by an unexpected event.
‘Ee-ee-ee-ee!’ a bevy of female voices squealed with such reckless enthusiasm that the men abandoned their conversation and looked round in amazement.
Don Tsurumaki was dashing across the hall.
‘Surprise!’ he shouted, pointing with a laugh to the curtain that covered one of the walls. That was where the squeal had come from.
The conductor waved his baton dashingly, the firemen rendered a thunderous, rollicking little motif, and the curtain parted to reveal a line of girls in gauzy skirts. They were Japanese, but they were under the command of a redheaded, long-limbed Frenchwoman.
‘Mes poules, allez-op!’ she shouted, and the girls in the line all hoisted their skirts and kicked one leg up into the air.
‘A cancan!’ the guests murmured. ‘A genuine cancan!’
The dancers did not kick their legs up so very high, and the limbs themselves were perhaps rather short, but nonetheless the audience was absolutely delighted. The famous Parisian attraction must have been quite a curiosity in Japan – the sur
prise was an obvious success.
Erast Petrovich saw Obayasi gazing spellbound at the cancan – she turned pink and put her hand over her mouth. The other ladies were also staring wide-eyed at the stage.
The titular counsellor looked round for O-Yumi.
She was standing with her Briton, beating out the furious rhythm with her fan and moving her finely modelled head slightly as she followed the dancers’ movements. Suddenly O-Yumi did something odd that probably no one but Fandorin could have seen – they were all so engrossed in the cancan. She lifted up the hem of her dress and kicked up her leg in its silk stocking – very high, above her head, far higher than the dancers. It was a long, shapely leg, and the movement was so sudden that the silver slipper slipped off her foot. After performing a glittering somersault in the air, this ephemeral object started falling and was caught deftly by Bullcox. The Englishman and his lady friend laughed, then the Right Honourable went down on one knee, took hold of the foot without a slipper, held the slim ankle slightly longer than was necessary and put the slipper back in its place.
Erast Petrovich felt a sharp, painful sensation and turned his eyes away.
With a true beauty,
Her simple silver slippers
Can also fly high
1 ‘Welcome’ (Japanese)
THE FIRST RAY OF SUNLIGHT
Late in the night, closer to the end of that interminable day, Erast Petrovich was sitting in the office of the head of the municipal police. They were waiting for the third member of the investigative group, the Japanese inspector.
In the not so distant past, Sergeant Walter Lockston had served as a guardian of the law in some cattle town in the Wild West of America, and he had retained all the manners of that uncivilised place. The sergeant sat there with his feet up on the table, swaying on his chair; his uniform cap was pushed forward almost as far as his nose, like a cowboy hat, he had a dead cigar protruding from the corner of his mouth and two massive revolvers hanging on his belt.
The policeman never stopped talking for a moment, cracking jokes and doing everything possible to demonstrate that he was a regular down-to-earth fellow, but Fandorin became more and more convinced that Lockston was not as simple as he was pretending to be.
‘The career I’ve had, you wouldn’t believe it,’ he said, stretching out his vowels mercilessly. ‘Normal people get promoted from sergeants to marshals, but with me it’s all backwards. In that dump that had five thousand cows to five hundred people, where the crime of the century was the theft of sixty-five dollars from the local post office, I was called a marshal. And here in Yokohama, where there are almost ten thousand people, not counting the danged hordes of slanty-eyed locals, I’m only a sergeant. And at the same time, my assistant’s a lieutenant. Ain’t that a hoot! That’s the way it’s set up. A sergeant, eh? When I write letters home, I have to lie, I sign them “Captain Lockston”. That’s what I should rightfully be, a captain. This sergeant business is some European contrivance of yours. So tell me, Rusty, do you have sergeants in Russia?’
‘No,’ replied Erast Petrovich, who had already resigned himself to that appalling ‘Rusty’, which was the result, on the one hand, of Lockston’s inability to pronounce the name ‘Erast’ and, on the other, of the grey hair on the titular counsellor’s temples. The only thing that irritated him was the stubbornness with which the office’s incumbent avoided talking about the matter at hand. ‘We don’t have sergeants in the police. Walter, I asked you what you know about that establishment, the “Rakuen”?’
Lockston took the cigar out of his mouth and spat brown saliva into the wastepaper basket. He looked at the Russian with his watery, slightly bulging eyes and seemed to realise that this man would not give up that easily. He screwed up his copper-red face into a wince and said reluctantly:
‘You see, Rusty, the Rakuen is on the other side of the river, and that’s not the Settlement. That’s to say, legally speaking it’s our territory, but white folks don’t live there, only yellowbellies. So we don’t usually stick our noses in there. Sometimes the Jappos stab each other to death, it happens all the time. But until they touch the white folk, I do nothing. That’s something like an unspoken agreement that we have.’
‘But in this case there is a suspicion that a Russian subject has been killed.’
‘So you told me,’ Lockston said with a nod. ‘And you know what I have to say to that? Bullshit, drivel. If your Mr B. kicked the bucket because some drunk happened to catch him on the neck with a finger, the old man must have been on his last legs already. What damned kind of murder is that? Let me tell you what a real murder looks like. This one time at Buffalo Creek …’
‘But what if Blagolepov was murdered?’ the embassy official interrupted after he had listened to several harrowing stories from the criminal history of the cowboy town.
‘Well then …’ The sergeant screwed his eyes up fiercely. ‘Then the slanty-eyes will answer to me for it. If it really is one of their lousy oriental tricks, they’ll regret they ever did the dirt on my territory. The year before last at the Ogon-basi bridge (and that, note, is already outside the bounds of the Settlement) they stabbed a French officer-boy. From behind, sneaky-like. This psychopath, an ex-samurai, turned nasty because his kind had been forbidden to carry swords. Whatever happens here, for them the whites are always to blame. So I called out all my lads and caught the son of a bitch, he hadn’t even washed the blood off his sword yet. How he begged me to let him slice his belly open! Well, screw him. I dragged him round the native quarter on a rope, to let the yellowbellies get a good look, and afterwards I strung him up with the same rope, no messing. Of course, the Jappos made a big scandal of it. Said they ought to have tried the psycho themselves and chopped his head off, the way they do things round here. I don’t think so. I prefer to pay my own debts. And if I come to believe that your compatriot didn’t kick the bucket on his own, but some Jap gave him a hand …’ Lockston didn’t finish what he was saying: he simply slammed his fist down eloquently on the desk.
‘Do you know the inspector who has been assigned to us from the Japanese police? The g-gentleman is called Goemon Asagawa.’
Erast Petrovich deliberately spoke about the Japanese with emphatic correctness, making it clear that he did not like the sergeant’s choice of words. The American seemed to take the hint.
‘I know him. He’s in charge of the station on Wagon Street, that’s in the Native Town. Of all the yellow … Of all the Japanese, Go is the smartest. We’ve worked together a couple of times already, on mixed cases when the mischief-makers were whites and yell … I mean natives. He’s a really young guy, only thirty, but experienced. He’s been in the police about fifteen years.’
‘How is that possible?’ Fandorin asked in surprise.
‘Well, he’s a hereditary yoriki.’
‘Who?’
‘A yoriki, it’s like a precinct cop. Under the old regime, the shoguns, the usual thing was for every trade, even every job, to pass from father to son. For instance, if your father was a water-carrier, then you’re going to spend your entire life carting around barrels of water. If your old man was the deputy head of the fire brigade, then you’ll be the deputy head too. That was why everything here fell apart on them – there was no point in straining yourself, you couldn’t jump any higher than your dear old dad anyway. And Go’s from a family of yoriki. When his father was killed by a robber, the lad was only thirteen. But order is order: he hung two swords on his belt, picked up a truncheon and went to work. He told me that the first year he carried the long sword under his arm so that it wouldn’t drag along the ground.’
‘But can a b-boy really maintain order in an entire neighbourhood?’
‘He can here, because the Jappos … the Japanese don’t look at the man so much, they look at the position and the rank. And then, they respect the police here – they’re all samurai to a man. And then, Rusty, bear in mind that guys who were born into yoriki families have been taught the whol
e body of police science since they were little kids: how to catch a thief, how to disarm robbers and tie them up, and they can handle a truncheon in a fight like our cops have never even dreamed of. I think Go could do plenty when he was thirteen.’
Erast Petrovich listened with great interest.
‘And how is their police organised now?’
‘On the English model. There are out-of-work samurai everywhere you look now, so there’s no shortage of volunteers. If you’re interested in the details, ask Go – here he comes.’
Fandorin looked out of the window at the well-lit square and saw a tall Japanese in a black uniform jacket and white trousers, with a sword hanging at his side. He was walking towards the station, swinging his right arm in military style.
‘You see he has a revolver on his belt,’ said Lockston, pointing. ‘That’s unusual for a native. They prefer to use a stick or, at a pinch, a sword.’
Inspector Asagawa was taciturn and calm, with a still face and quick eyes that were surely highly observant. The titular counsellor liked him. The Japanese began by ceremoniously but quite decisively putting the noisy sergeant in his place.
‘I am glad to see you too, Mr Lockston. Only please, if it is not too difficult for you, call me Goemon and not Go, although we Japanese feel more comfortable when we are addressed by our surnames. No thank you, I won’t have any coffee. Concerning my health and so forth, with your permission, we can talk later about that. My superiors have informed me that I come under the command of the vice-consul. What are your orders, Mr Fandorin?’
In this way the conversation was immediately set on business lines.
Erast Petrovich briefly described their goal.
‘Gentlemen, we have to find three samurai from Satsuma whom the Russian subject Captain Blagolepov carried on his launch last night. We have to ascertain if these men were involved in his sudden death.’
